Education in

Panama

School children

Education in Panama is compulsory for

the first seven years of primary education
and the three years of middle school.[1][2]
As of the 2004/2005 school year there
were about 430,000 students enrolled in
grades one through six (95%
attendance).[1] The total enrollment in the
six secondary grades for the same period
was 253,900 (60% attendance).[1] More
than 91% of Panamanians are literate.[1]

As of 2004, more than 92,500

Panamanian students attended the
University of Panama, the Technological
University of Panama, West Coast
University – Panama, Polytechnic
University of Central America and the
University of Santa Maria La Antigua, a
private Catholic institution.[1] Including
smaller colleges, there are 88 institutions
of higher education in Panama.[1]

History
Public education began in Panama soon
after separating from Colombia in 1903.
In 1906 the Panama College was found
by Methodists. Nowadays it is called the
Panamerican Institute, one of the best
private colleges in Panama. The first
efforts were guided by a paternalistic
view of the goals of education, as
evidenced in comments made in a 1913
meeting of the First Panamanian
Educational Assembly: "The cultural
heritage given to the child should be
determined by the social position he will
or should occupy. For this reason, sex
education should be different in
accordance with the social class to
which the student should be related."
This elitist focus changed rapidly under
United States influence.[3]

By the 1920s, Panamanian education

subscribed to a progressive educational
system, explicitly designed to assist the
able and ambitious individual in search
of upward social mobility. Successive
national governments gave a high priority
to the development of a system of (at
least) universal primary education. In the
late 1930s, as much as one-fourth of the
national budget went to education.
Between 1920 and 1934, primary-school
enrollment doubled. Adult illiteracy, more
than 70 percent in 1923, dropped to
roughly half the adult population in
scarcely more than a decade.[3]

By the early 1950s, adult illiteracy had

dropped to 28 percent. The rate of gain
had also declined and further
improvements were slow in coming. The
1950s saw essentially no improvement;
adult world life illiteracy was 27 percent
in 1960. There were notable gains in the
1960s, however, and the rate of adult
illiteracy dropped 8 percentage points by
1970. According to 1980 estimates, only
13 percent of Panamanians over 10
years of age were illiterate. Men and
women were approximately equally
represented among the literate. The most
notable disparity was between urban and
rural Panama; 94 percent of city-dwelling
adults were literate but less than two-
thirds of those in the countryside were—a
figure that also represented continued
high illiteracy rates among the country's
Indian population.[3]

From the 1950s through the early 1980s,

education enrollments expanded faster
than the rate of population growth as a
whole and, for most of that period, faster
than the school-age population. The
steepest increases came in secondary
and higher education enrollments, which
increased ten and more than thirty times
respectively. By the mid-1980s, primary
school enrollment rates were roughly 113
percent of the primary-school-aged
population. Male and female enrollments
were relatively equal overall, although
there were significant regional
variations.[3]

High school students from Panama City

Enrollments at upper levels of schooling
had increased strikingly in relative and
absolute terms since 1960. Between
1960 and the mid-1980s, secondary-
school enrollments expanded some four-
and-a-half times and higher education
nearly twelve-fold. In 1965, fewer than
one-third of children of secondary school
age were in school and only 7 percent of
people ages 20 to 24 years. In the mid-
1980s, almost two-thirds of secondary-
school-age children were enrolled, and
about 20 percent of individuals ages 20
to 24 years were in institutions of higher
education.[3]
Currently Panama has an overall literacy
rate of more than 94%.[4]

References
1. "Background Note: Panama" .
Bureau of Western Hemisphere
Affairs, U.S. Department of State
(February 2008). This article
incorporates text from this source,
which is in the public domain.
2. Ministry of Education of Panama
3.  This article incorporates public
domain material from the Library of
Congress document: Patricia Kluck
(December 1987). Sandra W. Meditz
and Dennis M. Hanratty (ed.).
 "Panama: A country study" . Federal
Research Division. Education.
4. [1]

External links
Education in The Republic of Panama

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